The revisionist Judy Miller/Valerie Plame dramatization Nothing But the Truth has yet to find the traction its makers had hoped for in Toronto ("As a bitchy, comic/melodramatic woman’s picture on the order of All About Eve or The Women, Rod Lurie’s Nothing But The Truth is wildly entertaining," wrote one critic. "Unfortunately for Lurie, I think it’s probably supposed to be a serious political parable about This Fix We Find Ourselves in Now"), but not all seems lost. Especially for journalists, a few of whom Kate Beckinsale shadowed in preparation for her role as the Miller-esque Rachel Armstrong, and with whom she drew a number of novel professional comparisons to actors Monday at Truth's TIFF premiere. Like the one where we wait behind a barricade for 90 minutes to get 45 seconds with her? Or the one where Vincent Gallo assails our former colleague as an "ugly cunt"? We know, we know — it's uncanny! Learn more in the video after the jump. [AP]

We'd be lying if we told you we watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles with any regularity. But after being made aware of this clip from last night's show, in which Garbage lead-singer Shirley Manson morphs from a men's urinal into an old-school, T-1000 liquid Terminator, we think we might have to start tuning in. They've actually turned the beloved singer of "Queer" and "Stupid Girl" into a killer-robot urine receptacle, who can extinguish any full-bladdered obstacles in her mission to destroy teenage John Connor with one extension of her built-in fingercicle feature. That's bad ass! [Terminator]

Like the swallows returning to the missions of San Juan Capistrano, all of the women attending the Marc Jacobs fashion show flocked to quirky actor Elijah Wood. The Lord of The Rings star could not find a moment of peace in the tents of Bryant Park. Wood was startled by his newfound status as a hunk, but relished the experience all the same. Wood said, "I always thought that everybody loved Sean Astin from the movies, but I guess it was wrong. Shhh...don't tell my gal pal, but I'm loving this. It's going to make her super jealous and I love it when she's jealous."

Lawsuits Waiting to Happen, Vol. MCXVIII: Now that it's been rid of Bob Shaye and his 500-thread-count sheets, New Line's bed these days seems a friendlier habitat for Mike De Luca. The studio's ex-production boss reportedly plans to exercise its genre mandate with The Thirteenth Room, a novel adaptation whose rights NL acquired Monday and which De Luca is looking to produce. Stop us if you've heard the logline before, though: "[The book] follows a man accused of brutally murdering his wife who is given a chance to save her by going back in time, in one-hour increments. He puts together clues to figure out not only who killed her but why." De Luca thinks the whole thing's pretty crafty. "It has a great cinematic structure that unfolds in reverse," he told Variety. Meanwhile, we're waiting for word on whether Christopher Nolan's lawyers plan to follow the hot new Watchmen/Disturbia model of suing De Luca after he's shot his unofficial Memento revision. It's not a trend we're fond of, but neither are remakes. Call it even. [Variety]

· The story we could just never seem to wrap our heads around—that of Sean Avery, former New York Rangers player and Vogue (for women) fashion intern—will perhaps reveal its mysteries in New Line's movie about his slapshot-fabulous life. (Hey—Slapshot Fabulous! There's your title!) [THR] · More online-incubated series pickups: CBS ordered We Need Girlfriends, based on the YouTube series of the same name, and put the Cavemen team of Bill Martin and Mike Schiff in charge. [Variety] · So we can't have an Arrested Development movie, but we can have a Blue Man Group movie? Where is the justice? (And Tobias is available for readings.) [Variety] · David Strathairn, Alan Alda, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker and Paul Rudd have joined the cast of Howl, which already stars James Franco in yet another movie based on the life of a famous American Gay. (Keep it coming, Franco!) [THR] · Amanda Seyfriend and Channing Tatum will play star-crossed, wartime lovers in Dear John, based on a book by the same author as The Notebook. We understand that there's only a nominal amount of stepping-up involved. [Variety]

At perhaps the worst time in years for new movies, and with little advance fanfare from their Disney benefactors, the Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz era of At the Movies officially began over the weekend. If you happened to miss it (who are we kidding, of course you did), never fear: We attempted some of the heavy lifting for you in clips you'll find after the jump. Seeing as it's almost too easy to pile on a critic who actually issues praise like, "It's Don Cheadle's uncanny ability to create a complete character — and not just an archetype — that saves [Traitor]" aloud, and our minds haven't changed much since the pair was named co-hosts in July, for now we defer to the expert jury at EW's PopWatch blog, where the consensus hovers between general ambivalence and "Ben Lyons is about as much of an expert about films as Heidi Montag is about the art of sound":

Keira Knightley dropped by the Late Show last night in the midst of the host's near Network-worthy televised meltdown about our doomed planet. To her credit, she managed to evade all the dark prophesying, and even remained chipper when Letterman forced her to address the one topic that follows her more tenaciously than a swarthy French Riviera paparazzo on a Vespa: her body. Whether she's being accused of being a fanorexic thinspiration, or suing over those accusations, or being entered by her own studio into a Wet Nightie Contest, or fighting off their one-sheet breast-enhancement attempts, it seems no body has endured more scrutiny than hers. Can you blame her for not wanting to squat on cue? [Late Show]

Heading into Sunday night's VMAs, one could never have predicted that the Jonas Brothers would end up central to the ceremony's only real controversy; and yet, thanks to Russell Brand's purity-tweaking jokes and Jordin Sparks's impassioned tirade against sluts, there they found themselves. Would the squeaky-clean trio retaliate by wagging their ringed fingers in Brand's face, or would they take Courtney Love's colorful advice to sample "some pussy and some cock and shut the hell up"? According to the BBC, they chose a different route, claiming to be fans of Brand (thanks to his last Conan O'Brien appearance) and giving him some pointers on pleasing the fickle American audience:

There's only so much of the Toronto Film Festival's flavor and clusterfucky pageantry we can deduce from our workstation deep in the Defamer Salt Mines, but until the State Department restores our passports to good standing and we get that furlough we've been promised since mid-2005, we're happy to defer to our all-seeing operatives on the scene. One particularly attentive tipster writes today from the party honoring RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie's trilogy-launching crime caper featuring Jeremy Piven as the manager of a junkie rock star/art thief/Mafia scion. Which was evidently beside the point once Piven arrived with his own drama, as our mole reports after the jump:

You might have caught a movie this summer by the name of The Dark Knight—a little film that featured [SPOILER ALERT] pencils through skulls, long-winded monologues about surgical disfigurement, and one incinerated Maggie Gyllenhaal—and at times thought to yourselves, "Perhaps this wasn't the best choice for my daughter's Girl Scouts troop monthly Fun Night outing." But it was precisely its PG-13 rating that helped catapult the Chris Nolan film to its current record-breaking box office take of over five hundred gazillion dollars. Other directors are now wondering who at the MPAA they have to fuck to get a similar hall pass on their own darkly violent visions (and please, please God let it not be the notoriously scissor-happy Joan "The Snipper" Graves). But according to Max Payne director John Moore, it was the reverse scenario of the MPAA handing out the sexual favors to the filmmakers:

We don't traffic in empathy much around here — especially for studio heads — but you can't help but feel a bit sorry for Alan Horn these days, who has been reduced to peering under his car in a paranoid state before each trip to and from the Warners lot, searching for some Harry Potter fan's homemade peat-moss explosive affixed to his gas tank with frog spit and the hovering air of revenge. Surely he knew what he was getting into when he pushed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from this November to July 2009 (he's already apologized), but still, no one deserves to live under the type of shrieking death-threat duress graphically laid out by The Wall Street Journal:

Occasional actress Sienna Miller took her recent yoga lesson from the studio into the mean streets of Hollywood on Monday, where she performed a series of street contortion exhibitions with a comely partner. Miller explained, "As an actress, most people focus in on my face and my breasts, but I have spent my summer learning how to use my whole body in my performances. I hope it will demonstrate to people that I am the total package." After clicking play on a yellow Sony Sports boombox, the sweet sounds of Enya provided the soundtrack for a surprisingly erotic routine from the two blondes and drew many curious onlookers to the front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Across the street, a man dressed as Spiderman said, "I hope this show isn't a permanent thing because they're going to steal a lot of money from us. A guy in a costume from the 99 Cent store can't compete with two girls turning into a pretzel."

"Boys pants, half-off." That's the punchline to one of our favorite Michael Jackson jokes. ("Why did Jackson go to Wal-Mart?") But now you really can own a pair of Jackson's underpants, via the creepiest eBay auction since Courtney Love's Papsmearpalooza For Charity. From Page Six:

When we mused last week that this 2004 cover of Life was the closest we'd ever get to our dream of seeing Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin, we thought we were speaking practically. After all, Saturday Night Live already has at least two performers capable of the role (the Palin-resembling Casey Wilson and the Phelps-derobing Kristen Wiig), and Fey's hands are too tied as a full-time Baldwin wrangler for her to keep making cameo appearances at her old stomping grounds. Today, though, we stumbled on this Vulture interview with 24-year-old SNL scribe Simon Rich (son of NY Times political columnist Frank Rich), and while the writer is perfectly chatty about most matters, he clams up provocatively when asked about rumors that Fey might return to SNL for this Saturday's season premiere:

Entourage star Jeremy Piven spent a good portion of his lunch yesterday wondering why he didn't have any company. Piven asked his waitress at a New York City eatery if she thought that season premiere of his HBO laffer wasn't quite up to snuff. The waitress remarked, "Eh, I missed it. I was watching Mad Men on Sunday night and sort of flipping back and forth between the VMAs." Piven then asked her if she was planning on watching it On Demand, but the waitress shook her head "no", then excused herself by explaining that she needed to get Diet Coke refills over to Table 12.

In what is some of the fastest turnaround in real-thing-to-movie time that we can remember, the story of Sean Avery, former NHL player and, paradoxically, former Vogue women's fashion intern, is being turned into a movie. It will be a romantic comedy, because no romantic comedies about the high-gloss world of fashion and New York frivolity have ever been made. We wonder though, what will the love interest plot line be like? Will there be jerking off? Yes jerking off! We can just picture a moment when the actor playing Avery, probably someone like Josh Lucas, or maybe someone a little less intense like Jesse Bradford, meets cute with the female lead, maybe a playful rival fashionista played by some frustrating television actress, and he says coyly yet masculinely "I'm going home to jerk off to you now. And that's a big compliment." That little zippy "Suddenly I See" song will swell and they'll both bop back to their ridiculous lower Manhattan apartments and then it will devolve into solo porn with sugary voiceover full of hackneyed hockey metaphors and Anna Wintour, sitting alone in a dark screening room, will adjust her wig and issue a guttural, disgusted-yet-oddly-pleased groan. Seriously, though, it is kind of an interesting story, and a male-perspective movie about the women's fashion industry has the potential to be a pleasant fish-out-of-water diversion. Or, you know, it could be cloying and awful and full of "haha, I'm not gay!!" panic jokes. Either way, we're surprised it's been so hastily picked up. And without even a chick lit book preceding it!

· It's really not the end of summer until Paula Abdul salivates over a Tupperware container filled with Rachael Ray's delicious Klonopin-chip brownies. Side note: We believe that video breaks the world record for on-camera time in which Ryan Seacrest remains completely silent. [RR] · HBO's online arm HBOlab is launching a new web series starring YouTube microcelebs. At least one passionate YouTube critic is aghast at the results. [YouTube Reviewed] · Requisite Annoying The Dark Knight Sequel Casting Rumor of the Day has Michael Caine confirming Johnny Depp and Philip Seymour Hoffman will play The Riddler and The Penguin, respectively. We stand by our assertion, however, that Hoffman was born to play The Kangaroo. [MTV] · We know we dumped Defamer Job Listings, but that doesn't mean we can't still pass along an opportunity here or there: "Verso Entertainment is looking for an office/personal assistant for company President Cash Warren (yes, J. Alba’s producer hubby). Work with Cash personally and with his new website ibeatyou.com which launched Spring 2008. Agency experience preferred." [Mail To] · Remember how much fun we had with the Scatalogical Madonna Song Title Game? Well, just wait for Anus Blanket Bingo! [big. crush.]

To Catch a Thief: When you're done parsing the genetic heritage of Dane Cook's slightly doppelgangy new film, we've got another, bigger provenance for you to deduce: Steven Spielberg is one of several defendants named in a new lawsuit accusing the creators of the 2006 hit Disturbia of stealing the idea from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Of course, they pretty much did; the Shia LaBeouf voyeurism thriller tied up a two-quadrant crowd-pleaser with a black ribbon of 21st-century paranoia, all on the way to grossing nearly $80 million domestically. The estate of Window source author Cornell Woolrich finally Netflixed the film over the weekend, it appears, alleging both copyright infringement and breach of contract in a suit filed today in New York. "What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation," the suit claims, also citing DreamWorks, Viacom and Universal among the offending parties. And here you thought Fox took its sweet time torching Warner Bros. over Watchmen. Expect a settlement by 2014, probably around the time that DreamWorks/Reliance deal closes. [Reuters]

Though it's been a long while since Courtney Love caused controversy at the VMAs, the singer wasn't about to let last night's purity ring flap pass by without giving that virginal young upstart Jordin Sparks the what-for. Yes, even though Love claims not to have watched last night's ceremony (though she adores host Russell Brand), she took to her blog to denounce the latest crop of chaste young performers, giving them the sort of X-rated advice that would make a Jonas Brother blush (not that Miley, though — she's heard it all). We've excerpted the best bits below, though we warn you that they're hard to read — not because of their shock value, but because their author is the garrulous misspeller Courtney Love:

The Toronto Film Festival is right about at its midway point — an essential milestone from which to take stock of noteworthy developments and drama that we couldn't help but watch smolder from Defamer HQ. And while some of our principal plotlines either have yet to unwind (Paris and her doc show up tomorrow) or were resolved to our satisfaction (The Wrestler wins the fest's distribution sweepstakes), there remains a bundle of loose ends requiring maintenance and attention from a distance. That's Canada for you! · A National Post writer went to the party for Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, where Michael Cera bumped around wearing his backpack and Kat Dennings, ahem, "gave off the unpretentious dewiness that is a visa of sorts to the country of bigger fame for starlets-on-the-climb." And if that fails, there's always Robert Rodriguez's hot tub.· Tired of his besties at Warner Bros., Patrick Goldstein upgraded in Toronto with newfound documentary sensation LeBron James. The NBA star is featured in Hoop Dreams-ish coming-of-age saga More Than a Game, which tracks five kids — including James (it was only six years ago!) — from their "decrepit inner-city gym" to their contention for a national high school basketball championship. It apparently made James cry and made producer/music mogul Jimmy Iovine call Goldstein, who pimps it lovingly, noting that Lionsgate might be at the front of the line to pick it up. · At last night's Sony Pictures Classics dinner, Anne Hathaway's shoes deflected attention from Charlie Kaufman's public awkwardness. That was nice of them! · Which reminds us: Celebrities! Starlets! Ptooey! Canada for the Canadians! [Via David Poland] · Does anyone up there has a spare camera he or she can lend to Jeffrey Wells? "Three young apes" stole his — and his iPhone. And he missed The Wrestler. At least buy the guy a drink or something if you see him. · Jesus — first The Wrestler, now Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Todd McCarthy is turning into Harry Knowles. · Tasting a hint of assent from critics and the public alike, Guy Ritchie OD'd on confidence and announced an entire Rocknrolla franchise. Last we heard, Joel Silver was still shopping the first one.